I’ve done many things involving government, including being a City Councillor, Cabinet minister and several years in charge of BC Constitutional Affairs. In a 25 year radio career concentrating on current affairs, I was the only major journalist in Canada who opposed the Meech Lake Accord/Charlottetown Accords and I played a major role in spawning the Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform. I have had 13 books published including bestseller Canada, is Anyone Listening. Frankly, our parliaments are not working, only needing the public to understand how the system really works. It’s serious, and I have some thoughts on making substantial yet uncomplicated improvements and they’re in my new book, Politically Incorrect, How Canada Lost Its Way and The Simple Path Home, published by Watershed Sentinel Books due out October, 2017.

Parliament is badly broken and ironically by a tool making the Prime Minister and cabinet “responsible” to the House of Commons which has become the tool whereby the PM totally controls the Commons. The government MP plays no part in forming policy or legislation, his rare questions in the House are scripted and must be punctiliously followed, he must always vote as ordered, has his speeches and constituency reports written for him and on it goes. I demonstrate how the PM enforces this discipline with rewards and penalties, including permanent expulsion, all backed up with plenty of evidence. Then, I demonstrate how this can be easily cured at no cost or need for constitutional amendment, only needing the public to understand how the system really works and insist upon changes that return independence to the MP and make him/her answerable to his constituency, not the backroom boys in the PMO.

Who could oppose this reform? All who prosper from one man rule by the Prime Minister, the backroom boys, the lobbyists, the elite and especially the oil industry which now controls Canada’s media as seen so clearly in BC, where it sustained the last government for 16 years.

One of the most respected journalists in the country, Mark Hume, writes the Introduction, and I quote, in part “But Mair argues that by failing to come to grips with the underlying structural issues that still exist in Canada, the future of the nation is at stake. To get at that problem, he says, we need to change the way Parliament works. And that won’t be easy because the establishment – read Ontario and Quebec – likes things just the way they are. ‘If you believe, as the Pollyannas do, that all’s well in this happy kingdom, you’re reading the wrong book,’ Mair says. He is hoping… that Canadians still have a stomach for a debate on the way the country is governed… (If) you are wondering how that might be done, Mair has got an earful for you. He always did have. All you have to do is tune in and turn up the volume, as Mair takes on a sacred topic nobody else seems to want to talk about. He is an older lion now than when he was a broadcasting giant, but the roar hasn’t left him”. – Mark Hume

Stay tuned, the book is finished and goes to the printer early next month.